A Blow to Creativity

The news of Michael Francis’s departure from JCPenney should have been as shocking to our industry as it was to Wall Street.

I don’t know if he was fired, departed on his own or took a “suggested resignation,” but this I’ll tell you: It’s not good news to the creative side of retailing. Our side of retailing.

When Ron Johnson moved from Cupertino to Plano, it appeared to be a huge get for JCPenney, a 110-year-old retail brand that was acting every bit its age: grumpy, arthritic, slow. But many people knew Johnson only by his title at Apple because, after all, it was all about Steve Jobs there. Nobody at Apple was allowed to talk about anything else.

But when he brought in Francis, his colleague from his Target days, the move promised to draw the shades open and let the sun pour in. Francis seemed the best cure for arthritis since Celebrex, and without the stomach discomfort.

Francis had done this before. It’s hard to remember, but Target had once been as boring and ordinary as its other mass merchandising colleagues. I’m not suggesting Francis was the entire brains behind the Target repositioning, but he was clearly a force – and a face. I once saw him present at the National Retail Federation’s annual show, a preview of the upcoming season of Target print and TV ads. It would have been worthy of a half-hour on Comedy Central.

You could see his hand in the quirky new Penney TV ads and the playful, eye-catching Sunday circulars. The old department store retailer was jive dancing.

But the music has stopped. Much of the blame has been laid on a new pricing policy that was going to do away with the dreaded word “sale,” replacing it with a three-tier series of everyday low prices, “month-long values” and clearance events.

The policy apparently both confused shoppers and turned them off. Note to retailers: Today’s shoppers don’t dread the word “sale.”

“We haven’t communicated our pricing change in a way that customers understand yet,” Johnson said earlier this month. “It’s just been kind of confusing.”

So, in classic blame-the-messenger style, Francis is gone for failing to clearly communicate a lousy policy that wasn’t working. Of course, as one retail analyst told the Associated Press, “Johnson was unlikely to fire himself.”

If JCPenney is going to turn this thing around, then, it will be without Michael Francis. And whatever backstage bickering led to his leaving, those who think creativity can resolve retailing’s problems should clap their hands three times and say “I believe.” Tinker Bell is again gasping for air.